SEM Has No Future

Gord Hotchkiss keeps guest blogger week rolling with “SEM Has No Future”

When Manoj asked me to do a guest post, he provided me (reluctantly) with a list of suggested topics. One of them was the Future of SEM. I decided to take that one, because I could start off with a wildly controversial headline. It’s Thursday, I’m grumpy and I just wanted to stir things up a little.

“What?” I can hear search marketers ranting across the blogosphere, “the Chairman of SEMPO says there’s no future for search engine marketing?” Yes, and what’s more, that’s good news for all of us. Okay, make that for some of us.

Search engines, and the form of marketing we’re currently familiar with, will disappear in the next 5 to 10 years. But here’s the good part. The act of a user requesting information through a query, either implicit or explicit, will pervade everything online.

For any of you who have read my ramblings in various places on the web will know I’m a huge proponent of consumer control. I love the web because it puts control squarely where it needs to be, in our hands, not in the hands of faceless multinational conglomerates. The internet is the ultimate democratization catalyst. And the act of searching for information, the initiative of a consumer asking to connect with content online, is the very embodiment of that control. It short circuits every existing power structure, and rewires them with consumers at the wheel. That’s monumental. That’s earthshaking, and we haven’t felt the full effects of that paradigm shift yet.

Because that simple act of requesting information is fundamental to how the web works, it will became the bedrock of the online world. The problem with search currently is that it’s rather clunky. The connection between the incredibly complexity of our thoughts and the vast amount of content online is as thin as a few words. It’s an impossibly tiny bottleneck to jam all that potential bandwidth through. Yet, as clunky as the current flavor of search is, it’s a quantum leap ahead of anything we’ve had previously. It’s a hell of a lot better than sifting through the card catalog of the local library.

So, you have an incredible useful connector that everyone wants to use, restricted by an interface problem. What’s more, you have huge buckets of revenue waiting to be dumped on you for every successful connection. It creates the perfect storm of initiative for research, improvement and control of that vital touch point. You’ve got the two most talked about companies in the world, Google and Microsoft, preparing to do battle for this very high ground. You’ve got the act of search spilling out of the PC into multiple platforms, including the one that will change the world, mobile. It’s inevitable that the current interface will be ripped apart and rebuilt.

When that happens, the search interface will go underground. It will be embedded behind other interfaces, toiling silently away on your behalf. The distinct act of searching, where we go to a search engine, launch a query and look at the results on a search page, will disappear. It will become integral to everything we do, online, on phones, and soon, on our entertainment units. It will power a huge part of our lives. And when that happens, search engine marketing as we know it will be dead.

Search engine marketing is dead! Long live consumer initiated marketing!

Here’s more good news/bad news. When the act of searching becomes embedded across our spectrum of activities, all the rules of marketing change. The old models of push, through a gazillion channels, are no longer valid. Everything becomes about pull, with the consumer doing the pulling. (By the way, I use the term consumer reluctantly. A friend of mine, Ray Podder, says the term consumer should be stricken from our vocabulary, because it doesn’t reflect the power they wield. If you care to know more about the reasoning behind this, check out a past column I wrote. But, for right or wrong, consumer is the commonly understood term, so I’ll stick with it for now). And when it comes to making sure the right message gets to the consumer when they start pulling, search marketers are ahead of most of the pack. We’ve been doing this for awhile, and the smartest of us are really trying to understand what’s in the consumer’s mind when they ask for information. This gives us a leg up when the world of marketing changes, but it’s a slight advantage, and will disappear quickly.

So, don’t believe that search marketing as we know it will last long, because search engines as we know them won’t last long. The clouds of change are gathering on the horizon. Search will become transparent, ubiquitous and essential. It will be the prevalent way to connect with a consumer. There is a thin chance for search marketers to exploit their current expertise, and if they do it well, they’ll control the high ground on the new marketing battlefield.